Golden Gate Spotlight
Apple today announced that it has rebuilt the search infrastructure that powers key features like Spotlight, Photos, and Mail across all of its major next-generation software platforms.
LLM search using Core Spotlight:
Level up basic search into a retrieval-augmented system using SpotlightSearchTool and LanguageModelSession. Explore Core Spotlight integration, delegate-based hydration patterns, and how metadata quality impacts your search results. Learn how to use custom PipelineStages for tasks like sentiment analysis. Discover best practices for indexing and building flexible, context-rich search experiences in your app.
So from what I understand from the WWDC keynote, Spotlight is actually going to work?? When I search for simple files, it fails the VAST majority of the time!
I feel like I am watching the Mac OS X Leopard intro again guys how did we mess up search so bad we have to present it again
Semantic search is different, in that its matches aren’t as crisp and Boolean. Rather than working like a simple index, it’s more like a thesaurus in effect.
[…]
Rather than compiling more exhaustive sets of keywords, semantic search can broaden the scope to cope better. And because we can interact through Siri, we can fine-tune our search results by specifying the cattle should be black and white, perhaps, and combining conventional search criteria such as location.
To get this to work effectively, there are some limitations. Because semantics are so contextual and variable, this involves apps and Core Spotlight. That’s a big benefit to user privacy, as Core Spotlight’s indexes are separated by user and stored locally, although in places like ~/Library/Metadata rather than volume-based Spotlight indexes in the existing hidden .Spotlight-V100 folders. And unlike global Spotlight indexing and search, it requires apps to have code to support both tasks, as it can’t just happen by magic.
While I’m sure we’ll all be impressed with many of the results of semantic search, hits that we never expected to find, it’s going to prove harder to assess those that it misses.
Never has it been so inconvenient to find a file whose name you know exactly
Maybe rebuilding Spotlight’s infrastructure will fix this, or maybe adding the semantic stuff will make handling simple cases like this worse.
Personally, in my experience, I’ve noticed that the new Spotlight is much faster than the one in MacOS 26 Tahoe. It opens with less delay, and finds the right app or file instantly when Spotlight in Tahoe seems to have had a slight delay.
See also: TidBITS-Talk.
Previously:
- Siri AI Announced
- WWDC 2026 Keynote
- Searching for Apps With Spotlight
- Runaway Spotlight With Pages Document on iCloud Drive
- “LG” Spotlight Indexing Bug
Update (2026-07-13): Howard Oakley:
Already that has revealed the qualities of what would be offered as a Top Hit in its ranked search, with scores such as
mrScore: 0.2516, mrScoreText: 0.6878, kMDItemDisplayName: 1.0000, mrScoreFreshness: 0.50000000, mrScoreResultType: 0.0700, freshnessDate: (null), pommesL1=0.0000, L2=-4999.0283While most of those are opaque, it’s notable that ‘freshness’ is included in ranking. In contrast, searches made in the Finder’s Find window are unranked, and don’t calculate any of those scores, nor take into account freshness.
Salient features of Spotlight’s AsYouTypeTopHit ranked search include:
- inclusion of hits across multiple search domains;
- a
freshness_scoreas a measure of recency or topicality;- three opaque scores of
mrScore,pommesL1andpommesL2;- related search considering similar data sources and websites;
- identification of Top Hits.
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I had the impression that Spotlight search was useless most of the time, even for basic things. Find Any File is much more helpful in that case. Looking forward to having a better search for everything that's not just file-search.
In 99% of all my searches I search for a fixed filename. And many times I need to search in a location which is not indexed. I do not want any default semantic search. Like Karsten I use Find Any File most of the time.
Semantic search has its place. But not as default search for files.
With Apple’s recent track record, I imagine the added complexity will only make it worse. I’d love to be proven wrong though
